Medicine ball babies & softly spoken attack commands

During Saturday's knife fighting class we tried to stab babies ... sort of. Ok, there were no babies in the gym and no babies were stabbed in the making of Saturday's knife class. Allow me to explain. During some of our sparring sessions one person had to hold a medicine ball and shield it from their opponent as if it were their own child they were trying to protect from a knife-wielding maniac. Believe it or not, I performed better while I was holding my baby. I guess it had to do with staying on the defensive and only countering when my opponent committed himself to an attack. When my opponent held the baby, he tore me up, filleted me. It was like I became so intent on trying to stab his medicince ball baby that I forgot all about defense. I think the medicine ball baby demonstrates two things: one, when we have  a little bit of motivation, even made up motivation of protecting a medicine ball, we perform better, sort of like the momma grizzly coming out in us; two,  having a more defensive-minded approach to the fight makes you more cautious, less willing to attack, but ready to exploit your opponent's mistakes.

This was my bouncing baby boy during
knife sparring. We had to cradle  the
medicine ball as if it were our own child
while fending off an attack.

Knife class also featured the use of voice commands and conditioning. This is how it worked: We had color-coded commands. Yellow meant do nothing. Red meant slash the hand and stab. Green meant push and slash. When the instructor said a color, we had to perform the appropriate action. Sounds easy, right? It is pretty easy when you pay attention and the volume of the commands stays consistent, but just when you become accustomed to the commands being yelled, the commands would be given at conversation volume and then at an even lower volume. The idea here is to be prepared to fight even if your sensory input does register threat. Your opponent probably won't announce his attack with a war cry and his attack may even come during a seemingly benign interaction when there is no yelling. For example, a guy might stop you on a street and ask if you have a light for cigarette. He's not yelling, the tone of his voice is neutral and the volume is low and then he's coming at you. So the varied volume of the instructor's voice commands forced us to ignore yelling or softly-spoken commands and focuse on what the color meant we should do. Just because there's lots of noise in a certain situation doesn't mean you lash out with an attack, and just because there's no noise it doesn't mean that all is ok.

Combat Fitness
There's code blue - 15 seconds rest during each station on the circuit. There's code red -  no rest between stations on the circuit. Now there's code x - exercise between stations on the circuit. Saturday's combat fitness (March 10) class debuted code x and it injected the circuit with a heavier work load. So instead of having rest or no rest between stations, we did mountain climbers, jumping jacks and a bunch of other exercises for 30 seconds between each station. It sucked while it lasted, but it made finishing the circuit all the more gratifying.